First Holiday Decorations

Out in blogland and in my neighborhood, people seem to have all their holiday decorations up! I prefer to do a build up that climaxes at Christmas Eve. We bring out the Advent box when Advent starts and I usually have to go running around for the correct colored candles. ( I think, pink purple and white, or maybe blue pink and white... whatever.. the middle one is white...)

Our Advent box has the Playmobil Nativity scene for the kids, all our Christmas books the prayers and lessons we like to do. I am feeling that a lot of the stuff I wrote up for our nightly ritual was appropriate when the kids were really little, but now they really want to talk about deeper theological meaning. We'll see how it goes once it officially starts Sunday night. Although we aren't Jewish, I like to take a break when Hanukkah starts to talk about that holiday too and use the books I have from the classroom when we covered all the winter holidays. We like any excuse to make potato pancakes and doughnuts.

We put the tree up about 2 weeks before Christmas because otherwise it looks pretty tired by the holiday. I've had to ask (beg?) the extended family not to get us any more Christmas decorations because we do NOT have one more surface available for decorations no matter how special. I can not seem to follow my own mandate, so this year I made the Holiday Dangles Garland from over at Allsorts Her pattern has paper cutouts for the dangles, but I was feeling inspired to do these felt disks:



That photo was taken before I finished them all. It's been so overcast and our house is darkish during the day, I'll take a photo of the whole thing when I've hung it in the right area.

I did another small craft show last night. It was fun and I sold more than I did at the big one a few weeks ago. I'm hoping to list the rest of the stuff at etsy. Maybe the sunlight will cooperate with my camera later in the week.